SYMBOLISM 


By ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 
SCIENCE AND THE MoDERN WORLD 


SYMBOLISM 


Its Meaning and Effect 


BY 
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 


F.R.S., SC.D. (CAMBRIDGE), HON. D.SC. (MANCHESTER). HON. LL.D. (ST. AN- 
DREWS), HON. D.SC. (UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN), HON. SC.D. 
(HARVARD AND YALE). FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE IN 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE AND PROFESSOR 
OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 


BARBOUR-PAGE LECTURES 


UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
1927 


joew Pork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1927 


All rights reserved 


Set up and PRE 
Published November, 3927. 


‘ 
: e 
- 2 
y 
. Pee Printed % 
; Ene 


DEDICATION 


These chapters were written before I had seen 
the Washington monument which faces the Cap- 
itol in the City of Washington, and before I had 
enjoyed the experience of crossing the borders of 
the State of Virginia—a great experience for an 
Englishman. 

Virginia, that symbol for romance throughout 
the world of English speech: Virginia, which was 
captured for that world in the romantic period 
of English history by Sir Walter Raleigh, its most 
romantic figure: Virginia, which has been true 
to its origin and has steeped its history in 
romance. 

Romance does not yield unbroken happiness: 
Sir Walter Raleigh suffered for his romance. 
Romance does not creep along the ground; like the 
memorial to Washington, it reaches upward—a 
silver thread uniting earth to the blue of heaven 
above. 


April 18, 1927. 


PREFACE 


In accordance with the terms of the Barbour- 
Page Foundation, these lectures are published by 
the University of Virginia. The author owes his 
thanks to the authorities of the university for 
their courtesy in conforming to his wishes in re- 
spect to some important details of publication. 
With the exception of a few trifling changes the 
lectures are printed as delivered. 

These lectures will be best understood by 
reference to some portions of Locke’s Essay 
Concerning Human Understanding. The au- 
thor’s acknowledgments are due to Locke’s 
Theory of Knowledge and Its Historical Rela- 
tions by Professor James Gibson, to Prole- 
gomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge by 
Professor Norman Kemp Smith, and to Scep- 
ticism and Animal Faith by George Santayana. 


A. N. W. 
Harvard University, June, 1927. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I. 


SOI NAAR YW Db 


—_ 
Q 


II. 


12. 


CHAPTER I 
ee VMPOLISM. 2) iw ew kk 
SYMBOLISM AND PERCEPTION. . . . . 
Nt MTHOOOIOCY 4. kkk 


FALLIBILITY AND SYMBOLISM . ° ° . ° 


DEFINITION OF SYMBOLISM ..... 
EXPERIENCE AS ACTIVITY... ... 
RG 


PRESENTATIONAL IMMEDIACY. . .. . 
PeRCEPTIVE EXPERIENCE . .. .. =. 


SYMBOLIC REFERENCE IN PErRCEPTIVE Ex- 
PERIENCE e e es * e e . J e J e 


MENTAL AND PuysicaL ...... 

ROuEs oF SENSE-DaTa AND SPACE IN PRESEN- 

TWATIQWAL-IMMEDIACY . §. /¢ . < '. 

MEMERUTIRICATION . 8.0 5k wk es 
CHAPTER II 


HuME ON CAUSAL EFFICACY. .... 


KANT AND CAUSAL EFFICACY. . .. . 
ix 


30 
RY) 


x CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
3. Drrect PERCEPTION OF CauSAL EFFICACY . 39 


4. PRIMITIVENESS OF CausaL Erricacy. -. + 43 
5. THE INTERSECTION OF THE Mopes oF PEr- 

CEPTION es ° e ° e s e e e e 49 

6. LOCALIZATION . +>» + «= )s\) es ceeneee 
Tur Contrast BETWEEN ACCURATE DEFINI- 

TION AND IMPORTANCE « (e+) =) epee 

8 CoNCLUSION . >:.. +>)». 1+) satis hie 


CHAPTER III 


Uses or SYMBOLISM °. "2 ss U9) ene 60 


SYMBOLISM 


\ 4 


at ‘ 
(sy OSes ea 


SYMBOLISM, 
ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


CHAPTER I 


1. Kinds of Symbolism. 


The slightest survey of different epochs of 
civilization discloses great differences in their at- 
titude towards symbolism. For example, during 
the medieval period in Europe symbolism seemed 
to dominate men’s imaginations. Architecture 
was symbolical, ceremonial was symbolical, 
heraldry was symbolical. With the Reformation 
a reaction set in. Men tried to dispense with 
symbols as ‘fond things, vainly invented,’ and 
concentrated on their direct apprehension of the 
ultimate facts. 

But such symbolism is on the fringe of life. It 
has an unessential element in its constitution. The 
very fact that it can be acquired in one epoch and 
discarded in another epoch testifies to its super- 


ficial nature. 
I 


2 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense 
artificial, and yet such that we could not get on 
without them. Language, written or spoken, is 
such a symbolism. The mere sound of a word, 
or its shape on paper, is indifferent. The word, 
is a symbol, and its meaning is constituted by the 
ideas, images, and emotions, which it raises in 
the mind of the hearer. 

There is also another sort of language, purely 
a written language, which is constituted by the 
mathematical symbols of the science of algebra. 
In some ways, these symbols are different to those 
of ordinary language, because the manipulation 
of the algebraical symbols does your reasoning 
for you, provided that you keep to the algebraic 
rules. This is not the case with ordinary lan- 
guage. You can never forget the meaning of 
language, and trust to mere syntax to help you 
out. In any case, language and algebra seem to 
exemplify more fundamental types of symbolism 
than do the Cathedrals of Medieval Europe. 


2. Symbolism and Perception. 


There is still another symbolism more funda- 
mental than any of the foregoing types. We look 
up and see a coloured shape in front of us, and 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 3 


we say,—there is a chair. But what we have 
seen is the mere coloured shape. Perhaps an 
artist might not have jumped to the notion of a 
chair. He might have stopped at the mere con- 
templation of a beautiful colour and a beautiful 
shape. But those of us who are not artists are 
very prone, especially if we are tired, to pass 
straight from the perception of the coloured shape 
to the enjoyment of the chair, in some way of use, 
or of emotion, or of thought. We can easily ex- 
plain this passage by reference to a train of difh- 
cult logical inference, whereby, having regard to 
our previous experiences of various shapes and 
various colours, we draw the probable conclusion 
that we are in the presence of a chair. I am very 
sceptical as to the high-grade character of the 
mentality required to get from the coloured shape 
to the chair. One reason for this scepticism is 
that my friend the artist, who kept himself to the 
contemplation of colour, shape and position, was 
a very highly trained man, and had acquired this 
facility of ignoring the chair at the cost of great 
labour. We do not require elaborate training 
merely in order to refrain from embarking upon 
intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is 
only too easy. Another reason for scepticism is 


4. SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


that if we had been accompanied by a puppy dog, 
in addition to the artist, the dog would have acted 
‘immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and 
would have jumped onto it by way of using it as 
such. Again, if the dog had refrained from such 
action, it would have been because it was a well- 
trained dog. ‘Therefore the transition from a 
coloured shape to the notion of an object which 
can be used for all sorts of purposes which have 
nothing to do with colour, seems to be a very 
natural one; and we—men and puppy dogs—re- 
quire careful training if we are to refrain from 
acting upon it. 

Thus coloured shapes seem to be symbols for 
some other elements in our experience, and when 
we see the coloured shapes we adjust our actions 
towards those other elements. This symbolism 
from our senses to the bodies symbolized is often 
mistaken, A cunning adjustment of lights and 
mirrors may completely deceive us; and even when 
we are not deceived, we only save ourselves by 
an effort. Symbolism from sense-presentation to 
physical bodies is the most natural and widespread 
of all symbolic modes. . It is not a mere tropism, 
or automatic turning towards, because both men 
and puppies often disregard chairs when they see 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 5 


them. Also a tulip which turns to the light has 
probably the very minimum of sense-presentation. 
I shall argue on the assumption that sense-per- 
ception is mainly a characteristic of more ad- 
vanced organisms; whereas all organisms have ex- 
perience of causal efficacy whereby their function- 
ing is conditioned by their environment. 


3. On Methodology. 


In fact symbolism is very largely concerned with 
the use of pure sense-perceptions in the character 
of symbols for more primitive elements in our ex- 
perience. Accordingly since sense-perceptions, of 
any importance, are characteristic of high-grade 
organisms, I shall chiefly confine this study of 
symbolism to the influence of symbolism on human 
life. It is a general principle that low-grade char- 
acteristics are better studied first in connection 
with correspondingly low-grade organisms, in 
which those characteristics are not obscured by 
more developed types of functioning. Con- 
versely, high-grade characters should be studied 
first in connection with those organisms in which 
they first come to full perfection. 

Of course, as a second approximation to elicit 
the full sweep of particular characters, we want 


6 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


to know the embryonic stage of the high-grade 
character, and the ways in which low-grade char- 
acters can be made subservient to higher types of 
functioning. 

The nineteenth century exaggerated the power 
of the historical method, and assumed as a mat- 
ter of course that every character should be 
studied only in its embryonic stage. Thus, for 
example, ‘Love’ has been studied among the 
savages and latterly among the morons. 


4. Fallibility of Symbolism. 


There is one great difference between sym- 
bolism and direct knowledge. Direct experience 
is infallible. What you have experienced, you 
have experienced. But symbolism is very fallible, 
in the sense that it may induce actions, feelings, 
emotions, and beliefs about things which are mere 
notions without that exemplification in the world 
which the symbolism leads us to presuppose. I 
shall develop the thesis that symbolism is an es- 
sential factor in the way we function as the result 
of our direct knowledge. Successful high-grade 
organisms are only possible, on the condition that 
their symbolic functionings are usually justified so 
far as important issues are concerned. But the 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 7 


errors of mankind equally spring from symbolism. 
It is the task of reason to understand and purge 
the symbols on which humanity depends. 

An adequate account of human mentality re- 
quires an explanation of (i) how we can know 
truly, (ii) how we can err, and (iii) how we can 
critically distinguish truth from error. Such an 
explanation requires that we distinguish that type 
of mental functioning which by its nature yields im- 
mediate acquaintance with fact, from that type of 
functioning which is only trustworthy by reason of 
its satisfaction of certain criteria provided by the 
first type of functioning. 

I shall maintain that the first type of function- 
ing is properly to be called ‘Direct Recognition,’ 
and the second type ‘Symbolic Reference.’ I shall 
also endeavour to illustrate the doctrine that all 
human symbolism, however superficial it may 
seem, is ultimately to be reduced to trains of this 
fundamental symbolic reference, trains which 
finally connect percepts in alternative modes of di- 
rect recognition. 


5. Definition of Symbolism. 


After this prefatory explanation, we must start 
from a formal definition of symbolism: The hu- 


8 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


man mind is functioning symbolically when some 
components of its experience elicit consciousness, 
beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other 
components of its experience. The former set of 
components are the ‘symbols,’ and the latter set 
constitute the ‘meaning’ of the symbols. The or- 
ganic functioning whereby there is transition from 
the symbol to the meaning will be called ‘symbolic 
reference.’ 

This symbolic reference is the active synthetic 
element contributed by the nature of the percip- 
ient. It requires a ground founded on some com- 
munity between the natures of symbol and mean- 
ing. But such a common element in the two 


natures does not of itself necessitate symbolic ref-_ 


erence, nor does it decide which shall be symbol 
and which shall be meaning, nor does it secure that 
the symbolic reference shall be immune from pro- 
ducing errors and disasters for the percipient. We 
' must conceive perception in the light of a primary 
phase in the self-production of an occasion of ac- 
tual existence. 

In defence of this notion of self-production aris 
ing out of some primary given phase, I would re- 
mind you that, apart from it, there can be no 
moral responsibility. The potter, and not the pot, 


—a— 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 9 


is responsible for the shape of the pot. An actual 
occasion arises as the bringing together into one 
real context diverse perceptions, diverse feelings, 
diverse purposes, and other diverse activities aris- 
ing out of those primary perceptions. Here ac- 
tivity is another name for self-production. 


6. Experience as Activity. 


In this way we assign to the percipient an ac- 
tivity in the production of its own experience, al- 
though that moment of experience, in its character 
of being that one occasion, is nothing else than the 
percipient itself. Thus, for the percipient at least, 
the perception is an internal relationship between 
itself and the things perceived. 

In analysis the total activity involved in per- 
ception of the symbolic reference must be referred 
to the percipient. Such symbolic reference re- 
quires something in common between symbol and 
meaning which can be expressed without reference 
to the perfected percipient; but it also requires 
some activity of the percipient which can be con- 
sidered without recourse either to the particular 
symbol or its particular meaning. Considered by 
themselves the symbol and its meaning do not re- 
quire either that there shall be a symbolic ref- 


IO SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


erence between the two, or that the symbolic 
reference between the members of the couple 
should be one way on rather than the other way 
on. The nature of their relationship does not in 
itself determine which is symbol and which is 
meaning. There are no components of experience 
which are only symbols or only meanings. ‘The 
more usual symbolic reference is from the less 
primitive component as symbol to the more primi- 
tive as meaning. 

This statement is the foundation of a thorough- 
going realism. It does away with any mysterious 
element in our experience which is merely meant, 
and thereby behind the veil of direct perception. 
It proclaims the principle that symbolic reference 
holds between two components in a complex ex- 
perience, each intrinsically capable of direct recog- 
nition. Any lack of such conscious analytical rec- 
ognition is the fault of the defect in mentality on 
the part of a comparatively low-grade percipient. 


7. Language. 


To exemplify the inversion of symbol and mean- 
ing, consider language and the things meant by 
language. A word is a symbol. But a word can 
be either written or spoken. Now on occasions 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT II 


a written word may suggest the corresponding 
spoken word, and that sound may suggest a 
meaning. 

In such an instance, the written word is a sym- 
bol and its meaning is the spoken word, and the 
spoken word is a symbol and its meaning is 
the dictionary meaning of the word, spoken or 
written. 

But often the written word effects its purpose 
without the intervention of the spoken word. Ac- 
cordingly, then, the written word directly symbol- 
izes the dictionary meaning. But so fluctuating 
and complex is human experience that in general 
neither of these cases is exemplified in the clear- 
cut way which is set out here. Often the written 
word suggests both the spoken word and also the 
meaning, and the symbolic reference is made 
clearer and more definite by the additional ref- 
erence of the spoken word to the same meaning. 
Analogously we can start from the spoken word 
which may elicit a visual perception of the written 
word. 

Further, why do we say that the word ‘tree’— 
spoken or written—is a symbol to us for trees? 
Both the word itself and trees themselves enter 
into our experience on equal terms; and it would 


I2 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


be just as sensible, viewing the question abstract- 
edly, for trees to symbolize the word ‘tree’ as for 
the word to symbolize the trees. 

This is certainly true, and human nature some- 
times works that way. For example, if you are a 
poet and wish to write a lyric on trees, you will 
walk into the forest in order that the trees may 
suggest the appropriate words. Thus for the poet 
in his ecstasy—or perhaps, agony—of composition 
the trees are the symbols and the words are the 
meaning. He concentrates on the trees in order to 
get at the words. 

But most of us are not poets, though we read 
their lyrics with proper respect. For us, the words 
are the symbols which enable us to capture the 
rapture of the poet in the forest. The poet is a 
person for whom visual sights and sounds and 
emotional experiences refer symbolically to words. 
The poet’s readers are people for whom his words 
refer symbolically to the visual sights and sounds 
and emotions he wants to evoke. Thus in the use 
of language there is a double symbolic reference: 
—from things to words on the part of the speaker, 
and from words back to things on the part of the 
listener. 

When in an act of human experience there is a 


a eee Fe ee ee eT 


— ee ee he ee Te 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 13 


symbolic reference, there are in the first place two 
sets of components with some objective relation- 
ship between them, and this relationship will vary 
greatly in different instances. In the second place 
the total constitution of the percipient has to ef- 
fect the symbolic reference from one set of com- 
ponents, the symbols, to the other set of compo- 
nents, the meaning. In the third place, the ques- 
tion, as to which set of components form the 
symbols and which set the meaning, also depends 
on the peculiar constitution of that act of ex- 
perience. 


8. Presentational Immediacy. 


The most fundamental exemplification of sym- 
bolism has already been alluded to in the discus- 
sion of the poet and the circumstances which elicit 
his poetry. We have here a particular instance 
of the reference of words to things. But this gen- 
eral relation of words to things is only a particu- 
lar instance of a yet more general fact. Our per- 
ception of the external world is divided into two 
types of content: one type is the familiar immedi- 
ate presentation of the contemporary world, by 
means of our projection of our immediate sensa- 
tions, determining for us characteristics of con- 


14 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


temporary physical entities. This type is the ex- 
perience of the immediate world around us, a 
world decorated by sense-data dependent on the 
immediate states of relevant parts of our own 
bodies. Physiology establishes this latter fact con- 
clusively; but the physiological details are irrele- 
vant to the present philosophical discussion, and 
only confuse the issue. ‘Sense-datum’ is a modern 
term: Hume uses the word ‘impression.’ 

For human beings, this type of experience is 
vivid, and is especially distinct in its exhibition of 
the spatial regions and relationships within the 
contemporary world. 

The familiar language which I have used in 
speaking of the ‘projection of our sensations’ is 
very misleading. There are no bare sensations 
which are first experienced and then ‘projected’ 
into our feet as their feelings, or onto the oppo- 
site wall as its colour. The projection is an in- 
tegral part of the situation, quite as original as the 
sense-data. It would be just as accurate, and 
equally misleading, to speak of a projection on the 
wall which is then characterized as such-and-such a 
colour. The use of the term ‘wall’ is equally mis- 
leading by its suggestion of information derived 
symbolically from another mode of perception. 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 15 


This so-called ‘wall,’ disclosed in the pure mode of 
presentational immediacy, contributes itself to our 
experience only under the guise of spatial exten- 
sion, combined with spatial perspective, and com- 
bined with sense-data which in this example reduce 
to colour alone. 

I say that the wall contributes itself under this 
guise, in preference to saying that it contributes 
these universal characters in combination. For the 
characters are combined by their exposition of one 
thing in a common world including ourselves, that 
one thing which I call the ‘wall.’ Our perception 
is not confined to universal characters; we do not 
perceive disembodied colour or disembodied ex- 
tensiveness: we perceive the wall’s colour and ex- 
tensiveness. The experienced fact is ‘colour away 
on the wall for us.’ ‘Thus the colour and the spa- 
tial perspective are abstract elements, character- 
izing the concrete way in which the wall enters into 
our experience. They are therefore relational ele- 
ments between the ‘percipient at that moment,’ 
and that other equally actual entity, or set of en- 
tities, which we call the ‘wall at that moment.’ 
But the mere colour and the mere spatial perspec- 
tive are very abstract entities, because they are 
only arrived at by discarding the concrete relation- 


I6 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


ship between the wall-at-that-moment and the per- 
cipient-at-that-moment. This concrete relationship 
is a physical fact which may be very unessential to 
the wall and very essential to the percipient. The 
spatial relationship is equally essential both to wall 
and percipient: but the colour side of the relation- 
ship is at that moment indifferent to the wall, 
though it is part of the make-up of the percipient. 
In this sense, and subject to their spatial relation- 
ship, contemporary events happen independently. 
I call this type of experience ‘presentational im- 
mediacy.’ It expresses how contemporary events 
are relevant to each other, and yet preserve a mu- 
tual independence. This relevance amid indepen- 
dence is the peculiar character of contemporane- 
ousness. This presentational immediacy is only 
of importance in high-grade organisms, and is a 
physical fact which may, or may not, enter into 
consciousness. Such entry will depend on atten- 
tion and on the activity of conceptual functioning, 
whereby physical experience and conceptual im- 
agination are fused into knowledge. 


9. Perceptive Experience. 


The word ‘experience’ is one of the most de- 
ceitful in philosophy. Its adequate discussion 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 17 


would be the topic for a treatise. I can only 
indicate those elements in my analysis of it 
which are relevant to the present train of 
thought. 

Our experience, so far as it is primarily con- 
cerned with our direct recognition of a solid world 
of other things which are actual in the same sense 
that we are actual, has three main independent 
modes each contributing its share of components 
to our individual rise into one concrete moment of 
human experience. Two of these modes of ex- 
perience I will call perceptive, and the third I will 
call the mode of conceptual analysis. In respect 
to pure perception, I call one of the two types con- 
cerned the mode of ‘presentational immediacy,’ 
and the other the mode of ‘causal efficacy.’ Both 
‘presentational immediacy’ and ‘causal efficacy’ in- 
troduce into human experience components which 
are again analysable into actual things of the ac- 
tual world and into abstract attributes, qualities, 
and relations, which express how those other ac- 
tual things contribute themselves as components to 
our individual experience. These abstractions ex- 
press how other actualities are component objects 
for us. I will therefore say that they ‘objectify’ 
for us the actual things in our ‘environment.’ Our 


18 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


most immediate environment is constituted by the 
various organs of our own bodies, our more re- 
mote environment is the physical world in the 
neighbourhood. But the word ‘environment’ 
means those other actual things, which are ‘ob- 
jectified’ in some important way so as to form 
component elements in our individual experience. 


10. Symbolic Reference in Perceptive 
Experience. 


Of the two distinct perceptive modes, one mode 
‘objectifies’ actual things under the guise of pres- 
entational immediacy, and the other mode, which 
I have not yet discussed, ‘objectifies’ them under 
the guise of causal efficacy. The synthetic activity 
whereby these two modes are fused into one per- 
ception is what I have called ‘symbolic reference.’ 
By symbolic reference the various actualities dis- 
closed respectively by the two modes are either 
identified, or are at least correlated together as 
interrelated elements in our environment. Thus 
the result of symbolic reference is what the actual 
world is for us, as that datum in our experience 
productive of feelings, emotions, satisfactions, ac- 
tions, and finally as the topic for conscious recog- 
nition when our mentality intervenes with its con- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT  I9 


ceptual analysis. ‘Direct recognition’ is conscious 
recognition of a percept in a pure mode, devoid of 
symbolic reference. 

Symbolic reference may be, in many respects, er- 
roneous. By this I mean that some ‘direct recog- 
nition’ disagrees, in its report of the actual world, 
with the conscious recognition of the fused product 
resulting from symbolic reference. Thus error is 
primarily the product of symbolic reference, and 
not of conceptual analysis. Also symbolic refer- 
ence itself is not primarily the outcome of concep- 
tual analysis, though it is greatly promoted by it. 
For symbolic reference is still dominant in ex- 
perience when such mental analysis is at a low ebb. 
We all know Aesop’s fable of the dog who 
dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection 
in the water. We must not, however, judge too 
severely of error. In the initial stages of mental 
progress, error in symbolic reference is the dis- 
cipline which promotes imaginative freedom. 
Aesop’s dog lost his meat, but he gained a step on 
the road towards a free imagination. 

Thus symbolic reference must be explained ante- 
cedently to conceptual analysis, although there is a 
strong interplay between the two whereby they 
promote each other. 


20 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


11. Mental and Physical. 


By way of being as intelligible as possible we 
might tacitly assign symbolic reference to mental 
activity, and thereby avoid some detailed explana- 
tion. It isa matter of pure convention as to which 
of our experiential activities we term mental and 
which physical. Personally I prefer to restrict 
mentality to those experiential activities which in- 
clude concepts in addition to percepts. But much 
of our perception is due to the enhanced subtlety 
arising from a concurrent conceptual analysis. 
Thus in fact there is no proper line to be drawn 
between the physical and the mental constitution of 
experience. But there is no conscious knowledge 
apart from the intervention of mentality in the 
form of conceptual analysis. 

It will be necessary later on to make some slight 
reference to conceptual analysis; but at present I 
must assume consciousness and its partial analysis 
of experience, and return to the two modes of pure 
perception. The point that I want to make here 
is, that the reason why low-grade purely physical 
organisms cannot make mistakes is not primarily 
their absence of thought, but their absence of pres- 
entational immediacy. Aesop’s dog, who was a 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 21 


poor thinker, made a mistake by reason of an er- 
roneous symbolic reference from presentational 
immediacy to causal efficacy. In short, truth and 
error dwell in the world by reason of synthesis: 
every actual thing is synthetic: and symbolic ref- 
erence is one primitive form of synthetic activity 
whereby what is actual arises from its given 
phases. 


12. Roles of Sense-data and Space in 
Presentational Immediacy. 


By ‘presentational immediacy’ I mean what is 
usually termed ‘sense-perception.’ But I am using 
the former term under limitations and extensions 
which are foreign to the common use of the latter 
term. 

Presentational immediacy is our immediate per- 
ception of the contemporary external world, ap- 
pearing as an element constitutive of our own ex- 
perience. In this appearance the world discloses 
itself to be a community of actual things, which 
are actual in the same sense as we are. 

This appearance is effected by the mediation of 
qualities, such as colours, sounds, tastes, etc., 
which can with equal truth be described as our 
sensations or as the qualities of the actual things 


22 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


which we perceive. These qualities are thus re- 
lational between the perceiving subject and the 
perceived things. They can be thus isolated only 
by abstracting them from their implication in the 
scheme of spatial relatedness of the perceived 
things to each other and to the perceiving subject. 
This relatedness of spatial extension is a completes 
scheme, impartial between the observer and the 
perceived things. It is the scheme of the morphol- 
ogy of the complex organisms forming the com- 
munity of the contemporary world. The way in 
which each actual physical organism enters into 
the make-up of its contemporaries has to conform 
to this scheme. Thus the sense-data, such as col- 
ours, etc., or bodily feelings, introduce the ex- 
tended physical entities into our experience under 
perspectives provided by this spatial scheme. The 
spatial relations by themselves are generic abstrac- 
tions, and the sense-data are generic abstractions. 
But the perspectives of the sense-data provided by 
the spatial relations are the specific relations 
whereby the external contemporary things are to 
this extent part of our experience. These con- 
temporary organisms, thus introduced as ‘objects’ 
into experience, include the various organs of our 
body, and the sense-data are then called bodily 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 23 


feelings. The bodily organs, and those other ex- 
ternal things which make important contributions 
to this mode of our perception, together form the 
contemporary environment of the percipient or- 
ganism. The main facts about presentational im- 
mediacy are: (i) that the sense-data involved 
depend on the percipient organism and its spatial 
relations to the perceived organisms; (ii) that the 
contemporary world is exhibited as extended and 
as a plenum of organisms; (iii) that presenta- 
tional immediacy is an important factor in the ex- 
perience of only a few high-grade organisms, and 
that for the others it is embryonic or entirely 
negligible. 

Thus the disclosure of a contemporary world by 
presentational immediacy is bound up with the dis- 
closure of the solidarity of actual things by reason 
of their participation in an impartial system of 
spatial extension. Beyond this, the knowledge 
provided by pure presentational immediacy is 
vivid, precise, and barren. It is also to a large 
extent controllable at will. I mean that one mo- 
ment of experience can predetermine to a consid- 
erable extent, by inhibitions, or by intensifications, 
or by other modifications, the characteristics of 
the presentational immediacy in succeeding mo- 


24 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


ments of experience. This mode of perception, 
taken purely by itself, is barren, because we may 
not directly connect the qualitative presentations 
of other things with any intrinsic characters of 
those things. We see the image of a coloured 
chair, presenting to us the space behind a mirror; 
yet we thereby gain no knowledge concerning any 
intrinsic characters of spaces behind the mirror. 
But the image thus seen in a good mirror is just 
as much an immediate presentation of colour quali- 
fying the world at a distance behind the mirror, as 
is our direct vision of the chair when we turn round 
and look at it. Pure presentational immediacy re- 
fuses to be divided into delusions and not-delu- 
sions. It is either all of it, or none of it, an im- 
mediate presentation of an external contemporary 
world as in its own right spatial. The sense-data 
involved in presentational immediacy have a wider 
relationship in the world than these contemporary 
things can express. In abstraction from this wider 
relationship, there is no means of determining the 
importance of the apparent qualification of con- 
temporary objects by sense-data. For this reason 
the phrase ‘mere appearance’ carries the sugges- 
tion of barrenness. This wider relationship of the 
sense-data can only be understood by examining 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 25 


the alternative mode of perception, the mode of 
causal efhcacy. But in so far as contemporary 
things are bound together by mere presentational 
immediacy, they happen in complete independence 
except for their spatial relations at the moment. 
Also for most events, we presume that their intrin- 
sic experience of presentational immediacy is so 
embryonic as to be negligible. This perceptive 
mode is important only for a small minority of 
elaborate organisms. 


13. Objectification. 


In this explanation of Presentational Imme- 
diacy, I am conforming to the distinction accord- 
ing to which actual things are objectively in our 
experience and formally existing in their own com- 
pleteness. I maintain that presentational im- 
mediacy is that peculiar way in which contempo- 
rary things are ‘objectively’ in our experience, and 
that among the abstract eritities which constitute 
factors in the mode of introduction are those ab- 
stractions usually called sense-data :—for example, 
colours, sounds, tastes, touches, and _ bodily 
feelings. 

Thus ‘objectification’ itself is abstraction; since 
no actual thing is ‘objectified’ in its ‘formal’ com- 


26 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


pleteness. Abstraction expresses nature’s mode of 
interaction and is not merely mental. When it 
abstracts, thought is merely conforming to nature 
—or rather, it is exhibiting itself as an element in 
nature. Synthesis and analysis require each other. 
Such a conception is paradoxical if you will per- 
sist in thinking of the actual world as a collection 
of passive actual substances with their private 
characters or qualities. In that case, it must be 
nonsense to ask, how one such substance can form 
a component in the make-up of another such sub- 
stance. So long as this conception is retained, the 
difficulty is not relieved by calling each actual sub- 
stance an event, or a pattern, or an occasion. The 
difficulty, which arises for such a conception, is to 
explain how the substances can be actually to- 
gether in a sense derivative from that in which 
each individual substance is actual. But the con- 
ception of the world here adopted is that of func- 
tional activity. By this I mean that every ac- 
tual thing is something by reason of its activity; 
whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other 
things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis 
of other things so far as they are relevant to it. 
In enquiring about any one individual we must 
ask how other individuals enter ‘objectively’ into 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 27 


the unity of its own experience. This unity of its 
own experience is that individual existing for- 
mally. We must also enquire how it enters into 
the ‘formal’ existence of other things; and this 
entrance is that individual existing objectively, 
that is to say—existing abstractly, exemplifying 
only some elements in its formal content. 

With this conception of the world, in speaking 
of any actual individual, such as a human being, 
we must mean that man in one occasion of his ex- 
perience. Such an occasion, or act, is complex and 
therefore capable of analysis into phases and 
other components. It is the most concrete actual 
entity, and the life of man from birth to death is 
a historic route of such occasions. ‘These con- 
crete moments are bound together into one society 
by a partial identity of form, and by the peculiarly 
full summation of its predecessors which each mo- 
ment of the life-history gathers into itself. The 
man-at-one-moment concentrates in himself the 
colour of his own past, and he is the issue of it. 
The ‘man in his whole life history’ is an abstrac- 
tion compared to the ‘man in one such moment.’ 
There are therefore three different meanings for 
the notion of a particular man,—Julius Cesar, for 
example. The word ‘Cesar’ may mean ‘Cesar in 


28 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


some one occasion of his existence’: this is the 
most concrete of all the meanings. The word 
‘Cesar’ may mean ‘the historic route of Cesar’s 
life from his Cesarian birth to his Czsarian as- 
sassination. The word ‘Cesar’ may mean ‘the 
common form, or pattern, repeated in each occa- 
sion of Cesar’s life.’ You may legitimately choose 
any one of these meanings; but when you have 
made your choice, you must in that context stick 
to it. 

This doctrine of the nature of the life-his- 
tory of an enduring organism holds for all types 
of organisms, which have attained to unity of ex- 
perience, for electrons as well as for men. But 
mankind has gained a richness of experiential con- 
tent denied to electrons. Whenever the ‘all or 
none’ principle holds, we are in some way dealing 
with one actual entity, and not with a society of 
such entities, nor with the analysis of components 
contributory to one such entity. 

This lecture has maintained the doctrine of a 
direct experience of an external world. It is im- 
possible fully to argue this thesis without getting 
too far away from my topic. I need only refer 
you to the first portion of Santayana’s recent book, 
Scepticism and. Animal Faith, for a conclusive 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 29 


proof of the futile ‘solipsism of the present mo- 
ment’—or, in other words, utter scepticism— 
which results from a denial of this assumption. 
My second thesis, for which I cannot claim San- 
tayana’s authority, is that, if you consistently 
maintain such direct individual experience, you will 
be driven in your philosophical construction to a 
conception of the world as an interplay of func- 
tional activity whereby each concrete individual 
thing arises from its determinate relativity to the 
settled world of other concrete individuals, at 
least so far as the world is past and settled. 


CHAPTER lf 


1. Hume on Causal Efficacy. 


It is the thesis of this work that human sym- 
bolism has its origin in the symbolic interplay be- 
tween two distinct modes of direct perception of 
the external world. There are, in this way, two 
sources of information about the external world, 
closely connected but distinct. These modes do 
not repeat each other; and there is a real diversity 
of information. Where one is vague, the other is 
precise: where one is important, the other is 
trivial. But the two schemes of presentation have 
structural elements in common, which identify 
them as schemes of presentation of the same 
world. There are however gaps in the determi- 
nation of the correspondence between the two 
morphologies. The schemes only partially inter- 
sect, and their true fusion is left indeterminate. 
The symbolic reference leads to a transference of 
emotion, purpose, and belief, which cannot be 
justified by an intellectual comparison of the di- 


rect information derived from the two schemes 
30 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 31 


and their elements of intersection. The justifica- 
tion, such as it is, must be sought in a pragmatic 
appeal to the future. In this way intellectual criti- 
cism founded on subsequent experience can en- 
large and purify the primitive naive symbolic 
transference. 

I have termed one perceptive mode ‘Presenta- 
tional Immediacy,’ and the other mode ‘Causal 
Efficacy.’ In the previous lecture the mode of 
presentational immediacy was discussed at length. 
‘The present lecture must commence with the dis- 
cussion of ‘Causal Efficacy.’ It will be evident to 
you that I am here controverting the most cher- 
ished tradition of modern philosophy, shared 
alike by the school of empiricists which derives 
from Hume, and the school of transcendental 
idealists which derives from Kant. It is unneces- 
sary to enter upon any prolonged justification of 
this summary account of the tradition of modern 
philosophy. But some quotations will summarize 
neatly what is shared in common by the two types 
of thought from which I am diverging. Hume * 
writes :—‘“When both the objects are present to 
the senses along with the relation, we call this 


perception rather than reasoning; nor is there in 
€ ‘Treatise’, Part III, Section II. 


32 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


this case any exercise of the thought, or any action, 
properly speaking, but a mere passive admission of 
the impressions through the organs of sensation. 
According to this way of thinking, we ought not to 
receive as reasoning any of the observations we 
may make concerning identity and the relation of 
time and place; since in none of them can the mind 
go beyond what is immediately present to the 
senses, either to discover the real existence or the 
relations of objects.” 

The whole force of this passage depends upon 
the tacit presupposition of the ‘mind’ as a pas- 
sively receptive substance and of its ‘impression’ 
as forming its private world of accidents. There 
then remains nothing except the immediacy of 
these private attributes with their private rela- 
tions which are also attributes of the mind. Hume 
explicitly repudiates this substantial view of mind. 

But then, what is the force of the last clause of 
the last sentence, “since . . . objects?” The 
only reason for dismissing ‘impressions’ from hav- 
ing any demonstrative force in respect to ‘the real 
existence or the relations of objects,’ is the im- 
plicit notion that such impressions are mere pri- 
vate attributes of the mind. Santayana’s book, 
Scepticism and Animal Faith, to which I have al- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 33 


ready referred, is in its earlier chapters a vigorous 
and thorough insistence, by every manner of beau- 
tiful illustration, that with Hume’s premises there 
is no manner of escape from this dismissal of iden- 
tity, time, and place from having any reference 
to a real world. There remains only what San- 
tayana calls ‘Solipsism of the Present Moment.’ 
Even memory goes: for a memory-impression is 
not an impression of memory. It is only another 
immediate private impression. 

It is unnecessary to cite Hume on Causation; for 
the preceding quotation carries with it his whole 
sceptical position. But a quotation * on substance 
is necessary to explain the ground of his explicit— 
as distinct from sporadic implicit presuppositions 
—doctrine on this point :—‘“I would fain ask those 
philosophers, who found so much of their reason- 
ings on the distinction of substance and accident, 
and imagine we have clear ideas of each, whether 
the idea of substance be derived from the impres- 
sions of sensation or reflection? If it be conveyed 
to us by our senses, I ask, which of them, and after 
what manner? If it be perceived by the eyes, it 
must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by 


the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses. But 
* Cf. Hume’s ‘Treatise’, Part I, Section VI. 


/ 


34. SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


I believe none will assert that substance is either 
a colour, or sound, or a taste. The idea of sub- 
stance must, therefore, be derived from an im- 
pression of reflection, if it really exist. But the 
impressions of reflection resolve themselves into 
our passions and emotions; none of which can pos- 
sibly represent a substance. We have, therefore, 
no idea of substance, distinct from that of a col- 
lection of particular qualities, nor have we any 
other meaning when we either talk or reason con- 
cerning it.” 

This passage is concerned with a notion of 
‘substance,’ which I do not entertain. ‘Thus it 
only indirectly controverts my position. I quote it 
because it is the plainest example of Hume’s initial 
assumptions that (i) presentational immediacy, 
and relations between presentationally immediate 
entities, constitute the only type of perceptive ex- 
perience, and that (ii) presentational immediacy 
includes no demonstrative factors disclosing a con- 
temporary world of extended actual things. 

He discusses this question later in his ‘Treatise’ 
under the heading of the notion of ‘Bodies’; and 
arrives at analogous sceptical conclusions. These 


\ e ee 
' conclusions rest upon an extraordinary naive as- 


sumption of time as pure succession. The assump- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 35 


tion is naive, because it is the natural thing to say; 
it is natural because it leaves out that character- 
istic of time which is so intimately interwoven that 
it is natural to omit it. 

Time is known to us as the succession of our 
acts of experience, and thence derivatively as the 
succession of events objectively perceived in those 
acts. But this succession is not pure succession: 
it is the derivation of state from state, with the 
later state exhibiting conformity to the antecedent. 
Time in the concrete is the conformation of state 
to state, the later to the earlier; and the pure suc- 
cession is an abstraction from the irreversible re- 
lationship of settled past to derivative present. 
The notion of pure succession is analogous to the 
notion of colour. There is no mere colour, but al- 
ways some particular colour such as red or blue: 
analogously there is no pure succession, but always 
some particular relational ground in respect to 
which the terms succeed each other. The integers 
succeed each other in one way, and events succeed 
each other in another way; and, when we abstract 
from these ways of succession, we find that pure 
succession is an abstraction of the second order, a 
generic abstraction omitting the temporal charac- 
ter of time and the numerical relation of integers. 


36 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


The past consists of the community of settled acts 
which, through their objectifications in the present 
act, establish the conditions to which that act 
must conform. 

Aristotle conceived ‘matter’-—idy—as being 
pure potentiality awaiting the incoming of form in 
order to become actual. Hence employing Aris- 
totelian notions, we may say that the limitation of 
pure potentiality, established by ‘objectifications’ 
of the settled past, expresses that ‘natural poten- 
tiality—or, potentiality in nature—which is ‘mat- 
ter’ with that basis of initial, realized form pre- 
supposed as the first phase in the self-creation of 
the present occasion. The notion of ‘pure poten- 
tiality’ here takes the place of Aristotle’s ‘matter,’ 
and ‘natural potentiality’ is ‘matter’ with that 
given imposition of form from which each actual 
thing arises. All components which are given for 
experience are to be found in the analysis of nat- 
ural potentiality. Thus the immediate present has 
to conform to what the past is for it, and the 
mere lapse of time is an abstraction from the more 
concrete relatedness of ‘conformation.’ The ‘sub- 
stantial’ character of actual things is not primarily 
concerned with the predication of qualities. It 
expresses the stubborn fact that whatever is set- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 37 


tled and actual must in due measure be conformed 
to by the self-creative activity. The phrase ‘stub- 
born fact’ exactly expresses the popular apprehen- 
sion of this characteristic. Its primary phase, 
from which each actual thing arises, is the stub- 
born fact which underlies its existence. Accord- 
ing to Hume there are no stubborn facts. Hume’s 
doctrine may be good philosophy, but it is cer- 
tainly not common sense. In other words, it fails 
before the final test of obvious verification. 


2. Kant and Causal Efficacy. 


The school of transcendental idealists, derived 
from Kant, admit that causal efficacy is a factor in 
the phenomenal world; but hold that it does not 
belong to the sheer data presupposed in percep- 
tion, It belongs to our ways of thought about the 
data. Our consciousness of the perceived world 
yields us an objective system, which is a fusion of 
mere data and modes of tiiought about those data. 

The general Kantian reason for this position is 
that direct perception acquaints us with particular 
fact. Now particular fact is what simply occurs as 
particular datum. But we believe universal prin- 
ciples about all particular facts. Such universal 
knowledge cannot be derived from any selection 


38 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


of particular facts, each of which has just simply 
occurred. Thus our ineradicable belief is only 
explicable by reason of the doctrine that particu- 
lar facts, as consciously apprehended, are the fu- 
sion of mere particular data with thought func- 
tioning according to categories which import 
their own universality in the modified data. Thus 
the phenomenal world, as in consciousness, is a 
complex of coherent judgments, framed according 
to fixed categories of thought, and with a content 
constituted by given data organized according to 
fixed forms of intuition. 

This Kantian doctrine accepts Hume’s naive 
presupposition of ‘simple occurrence’ for the mere 
data. Ihave elsewhere called it the assumption of 
‘simple location,’ by way of applying it to space as 
well as to time. 

I directly deny this doctrine of ‘simple occur- 
rence.’ There is nothing which ‘simply happens.’ 
Such a belief is the baseless doctrine of time as 
‘pure succession.’ The alternative doctrine, that 
the pure succession of time is merely an abstract 
from the fundamental relationship of conforma- 
tion, sweeps away the whole basis for the inter- 
vention of constitutive thought, or constitutive in- 
tuition, in the formation of the directly appre- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 39 


hended world. Universality of truth arises from 
the universality of relativity, whereby every par- 
ticular actual thing lays upon the universe the ob- 
ligation of conforming to it. Thus in the analysis 
of particular fact universal truths are discover- 
able, those truths expressing this obligation. The 
given-ness of experience—that is to say, all its 
data alike, whether general truths or particular 
sensa or presupposed forms of synthesis—ex- 
presses the specific character of the temporal re- 
lation of that act of experience to the settled actu- 
ality of the universe which is the source of all con- 
ditions. The fallacy of ‘misplaced concreteness’ 
abstracts from time this specific character, and 
leaves time with the mere generic character of 
pure succession. 


3. Direct Perception of Causal Efficacy. 


The followers of Hume and the followers of 
Kant have thus their diverse, but allied, objections 
to the notion of any direct perception of causal 
efficacy, in the sense in which direct perception is 
antecedent to thought about it. Both schools find 
‘causal efficacy’ to be the importation, into the 
data, of a way of thinking or judging about those 
data. One school calls it a habit of thought; the 


40 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


other school calls it a category of thought. Also 
for them the mere data are the pure sense-data. 

If either Hume or Kant gives a proper account 
of the status of causal efficacy, we should find that 
our conscious apprehension of causal efficacy 
should depend to some extent on the vividness of 
the thought or of the pure intuitive discrimina- 
tion of sense-data at the moment in question. For 
an apprehension which is the product of thought 
should sink in importance when thought is in the 
background. Also, according to this Humian- 
Kantian account, the thought in question is 
thought about the immediate sense-data. Accord- 
ingly a certain vividness of sense-data in immedi- 
ate presentation should be favourable to appre- 
hension of causal efficacy.. For according to these 
accounts, causal efficacy is nothing else than a way 
of thinking about sense-data, given in presenta- 
tional immediacy. Thus the inhibition of thought 
and the vagueness of sense-data should be ex- 
tremely unfavourable to the prominence of causal 
efficacy as an element in experience. 

The logical difficulties attending the direct per- 
ception of causal efficacy have been shown to de- 
pend on the sheer assumption that time is merely 
the generic notion of pure succession. This is an 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 4I 


instance of the fallacy of ‘misplaced concreteness.’ 
Thus the way is now open to enquire empirically 
whether in fact our apprehension of causal efficacy 
does depend either on the vividness of sense-data 
or on the activity of thought. 

According to both schools, the importance of 
causal efficacy, and of action exemplifying its pre- 
supposition, should be mainly characteristic of 
high-grade organisms in their best moments. Now 
if we confine attention to long-range identification 
of cause and effect, depending on complex reason- 
ing, undoubtedly such high-grade mentality and 
such precise determination of sense-data are re- 
quired. But each step in such reasoning depends 
on the primary presupposition of the immediate 
present moment conforming itself to the settled 
environment of the immediate past. We must not 
direct attention to the inferences from yesterday 
to today, or even from five minutes ago to the im- 
mediate present. We must consider the immedi- 
ate present in its relationship to the immediate 
past. The overwhelming conformation of fact, in 
present action, to antecedent settled fact is to be 
found here. 

My point is that this conformation of present 
fact to immediate past is more prominent both in 


4.2 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT, 


apparent behaviour and in consciousness, when the 
organism is low grade. A flower turns to the light 
with much greater certainty than does a human be- 
ing, and a stone conforms to the conditions set by 
its external environment with much greater cer- 
tainty than does a flower. A dog anticipates the 
conformation of the immediate future to his pres- 
ent activity with the same certainty as a human be- 
ing. When it comes to calculations and remote 
inferences, the dog fails. But the dog never acts 
as though the immediate future were irrelevant to 
the present. Irresolution in action arises from 
consciousness of a somewhat distant relevant fu- 
ture, combined with inability to evaluate its pre- 
cise type. If we were not conscious of relevance, 
why is there irresolution in a sudden crisis? 

Again a vivid enjoyment of immediate sense- 
data notoriously inhibits apprehension of the rele- 
vance of the future. The present moment is then 
all in all. In our consciousness it approximates to 
‘simple occurrence.’ 

Certain emotions, such as anger and terror, are 
apt to inhibit the apprehension of sense-data; but 
they wholly depend upon a vivid apprehension of 
the relevance of immediate past to the present, and 
of the present to the future. Again an inhibition 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 43 


of familiar sense-data provokes the terrifying 
sense of vague presences, effective for good or evil 
over our fate. Most living creatures, of daytime 
habits, are more nervous in the dark, in the ab- 
sence of the familiar visual sense-data. But ac- 
cording to Hume, it is the very familiarity of the 
sense-data which is required for causal inference. 
Thus the sense of unseen effective presences in the 
dark is the opposite of what should happen. 

4. Primitiveness of Causal Efficacy. 

The perception of conformation to realities in 
the environment is the primitive element in our 
external experience. We conform to our bodily 
organs and to the vague world which lies beyond 
them. Our primitive perception is that of ‘con- 
formation’ vaguely, and of the yet vaguer relata 
‘oneself’ and ‘another’ in the undiscriminated back- 
ground. Of course if relationships are unperceiv- 
able, such a doctrine must be ruled out on theoretic 
grounds. But if we admit such perception, then 
the perception of conformation has every mark of 
a primitive element. One part of our experience 
is handy, and definite in our consciousness ; also it 
is easy to reproduce at will. The other type of 
experience, however insistent, is vague, haunting, 
unmanageable. The former type, for all its deco- 


44 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


rative sense-experience, is barren. It displays a 
world concealed under an adventitious show, a 
show of our own bodily production. The latter 
type is heavy with the contact of the things gone 
by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves. 
This latter type, the mode of causal efficacy, is the 
experience dominating the primitive living organ- 
isms, which have a sense for the fate from which 
they have emerged, and for the fate. towards 
which they go—the organisms which advance and 
retreat but hardly differentiate any immediate dis- 
play. It is a heavy, primitive experience. The 
former type, the presentational immediacy, is the 
superficial product of complexity, of subtlety; it 
halts at the present, and indulges in a manage- 
able self-enjoyment derived from the immediacy of 
the show of things. Those periods in our lives— 
when the perception of the pressure from a world 
of things with characters in their own right, char- 
acters mysteriously moulding our own natures, be- 
come strongest—those periods are the product of 
a reversion to some primitive state. Such a rever- 
sion occurs when either some primitive function- 
ing of the human organism is unusually height- 
ened, or some considerable part of our habitual 
sense-perception is unusually enfeebled. 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 45 


Anger, hatred, fear, terror, attraction, love, 
hunger, eagerness, massive enjoyment, are feelings 
and emotions closely entwined with the primitive 
functioning of ‘retreat from’ and of ‘expansion 
towards.’ ‘They arise in the higher organism as 
states due to a vivid apprehension that some such 
primitive mode of functioning is dominating the 
organism. But ‘retreat from’ and ‘expansion 
towards,’ divested of any detailed spatial dis- 
crimination, are merely reactions to the way ex- 
ternality is impressing on us its own character. 
You cannot retreat from mere subjectivity; for 
subjectivity is what we carry with us. Normally, 
we have almost negligible sense-presentations of 
the interior organs of our own bodies. 

These primitive emotions are accompanied by 
the clearest recognition of other actual things re- 
acting upon ourselves. The vulgar obviousness of 
such recognition is equal to the vulgar obviousness 
produced by the functioning of any one of our five 
senses. When we hate, it is a man that we hate 
and not a collection of sense-data—a causal, effi- 
cacious man. This primitive obviousness of the 
perception of ‘conformation’ is illustrated by the 
emphasis on the pragmatic aspect of occurrences, 
which is so prominent in modern philosophical 


46 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


thought. There canbe no useful aspect of anything 
unless we admit the principle of conformation, 
whereby what is already made becomes a deter- 
minant of what is in the making. The obviousness 
of the pragmatic aspect is simply the obviousness 
of the perception of the fact of conformation. 

In practice we never doubt the fact of the con- 
formation of the present to the immediate past. 
It belongs to the ultimate texture of experience, 
with the same evidence as does presentational im- 
mediacy. The present fact is luminously the out- 
come from its predecessors, one quarter of a 
second ago. Unsuspected factors may have inter- 
vened; dynamite may have exploded. But, how- 
ever that may be, the present event issues subject 
to the limitations laid upon it by the actual nature 
of the immediate past. If dynamite explodes, then 
present fact is that issue from the past which is 
consistent with dynamite exploding. Further, we 
unhesitatingly argue backwards to the inference, 
that the complete analysis of the past must dis- 
close in it those factors which provide the condi- 
tions for the present. If dynamite be now ex- 
ploding, then in the immediate past there was a 
charge of dynamite unexploded. 

The fact that our consciousness is confined to 


> 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 47 


an analysis of experience in the present is no dif- 
ficulty. For the theory of the universal relativity 
of actual individual things leads to the distinction 
between the present moment of experience, which 
is the sole datum for conscious analysis, and per- 
ception of the contemporary world, which is the 
only one factor in this datum. 

The contrast between the comparative empti- 
ness of Presentational Immediacy and the deep 
significance disclosed by Causal Efficacy is at the 
root of the pathos which haunts the world. 


‘Pereunt et imputantur’ 


is the inscription on old sundials in ‘religious’ 
houses: 


‘The hours perish and are laid to account.’ 


Here ‘Pereunt’ refers to the world disclosed in 
immediate presentation, gay with a thousand tints, 
passing, and intrinsically meaningless. ‘Imputan- 
tur’ refers to the world disclosed in its causal efhi- 
cacy, where each event infects the ages to come, 
for good or for evil, with its own individuality. 
Almost all pathos includes a reference to lapse of 
time. 

The final stanza of Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes 
commences with the haunting lines :— 


48 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


‘And they are gone: ay, ages long ago 

Those lovers fled away into the storm.’ 
There the pathos of the lapse of time arises from 
the imagined fusion of the two perceptive modes 
by one intensity of emotion. Shakespeare, in the 
springtime of the modern world, fuses the two 
elements by exhibiting the infectiousness of gay 
immediacy :— 

‘.. . daffodils, 


That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty; .. .’ 


(The Winter's Tale, IV, iv, 118-120.) 


- But sometimes men are overstraied by their un- 
divided attention to the causal elements in the na- 
ture of things. Then in some tired moment there 
comes a sudden relaxation, and the mere presenta- 
tional side of the world overwhelms with the 
sense of its emptiness, As William Pitt, the Prime 
Minister of England through the darkest period 
of the French Revolutionary wars, lay on his 
death-bed at England’s worst moment in that 
struggle, he was heard to murmur, 


‘What shades we are, what shadows we pursue!’ 


His mind had suddenly lost the sense of causal ef- 
ficacy, and was illuminated by the remembrance of 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 49 


the intensity of emotion, which had enveloped his 
life, in its comparison with the barren emptiness of 
the world passing in sense-presentation. 

The world, given in sense-presentation, is not 
the aboriginal experience of the lower organisms, 
later to be sophisticated by the inference to causal 
efficacy. The contrary is the case. First the 
causal side of experience is dominating, then the 
sense-presentation gains in subtlety. Their mu- 
tual symbolic reference is finally purged by con- 
sciousness and the critical reason with the aid of 
a pragmatic appeal to consequences. 


5. The Intersection of the Modes of 
Perception. 

There cannot be symbolic reference between 
percepts derived from one mode and percepts 
from the other mode, unless in some way these 
percepts intersect. By this ‘intersection’ I mean 
that a pair of such percepts must have elements of 
structure in common, whereby they are marked 
out for the action of symbolic reference. 

There are two elements of common structure, 
which can be shared in common by a percept de- 
rived from presentational immediacy and by an- 
other derived from causal efficacy. These ele- 
ments are (1) sense-data, and (2) locality. 


5 


50 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


The sense-data are ‘given’ for presentational 
immediacy. This given-ness of the sense-data, as 
the basis of this perceptive mode, is the great doc- 
trine common to Hume and Kant. But what is 
already given for experience can only be derived 
from that natural potentiality which shapes a par- 
ticular experience in the guise of causal efficacy. 
Causal efficacy is the hand of the settled past in 
the formation of the present. The sense-data 
must therefore play a double rdle in perception. 
In the mode of presentational immediacy they are 
projected to exhibit the contemporary world in its 
spatial relations. In the mode of causal efficacy 
they exhibit the almost instantaneously precedent 
bodily organs as imposing their characters on the 
experience in question. We see the picture, and 
we see it with our eyes; we touch the wood, and we 
touch it with our hands; we smell the rose, and 
we smell it with our nose; we hear the bell, and we 
hear it with our ears; we taste the sugar, and 
we taste it with our palate. In the case of bodily 
feelings the two locations are identical. The foot 
is both giving pain and is the seat of the pain. 
Hume himself tacitly asserts this double reference 
in the second of the quotations previously made. 
He writes: ‘If it be perceived by the eyes, it must 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 51 


be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the pal- 
ate, a taste; and so of the other senses.” Thus 
in asserting the lack of perception of causality, he 
implicitly presupposes it. For what is the meaning 
of ‘by’ in ‘by the eyes,’ ‘by the ears,’ ‘by the pal- 
ate’? His argument presupposes that sense-data, 
functioning in presentational immediacy, are 
‘given’ by reason of ‘eyes,’ ‘ears,’ ‘palates’ func- 
tioning in causal efficacy. Otherwise his argument 
is involved in a vicious regress. For it must begin 
again over eyes, ears, palates; also it must ex- 
plain the meaning of ‘by’ and ‘must’ in a sense 
which does not destroy his argument. 

This double reference is the basis of the whole 
physiological doctrine of perception. The details 
of this doctrine are, in this discussion, philosophic- 
ally irrelevant. Hume with the clarity of genius 
states the fundamental point, that sense-data func- 
tioning in an act of experience demonstrate that 
they are given by the causal efficacy of actual 
bodily organs. He refers to this causal eflicacy as 
a component in direct perception. Hume’s argu- 
ment first tacitly presupposes the two modes of 
perception, and then tacitly assumes that presenta- 
tional immediacy is the only mode. Also Hume's 
followers in developing his doctrine presuppose 


52 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


that presentational immediacy is primitive, and 
that causal efficacy is the sophisticated derivative. 
This is a complete inversion of the evidence. So 
far as Hume’s own teaching is concerned, there is, 
of course, another alternative: it is that Hume’s 
disciples have misinterpreted Hume’s final posi- 
tion. On this hypothesis, his final appeal to ‘prac- 
tice’ is an appeal against the adequacy of the then 
current metaphysical categories as interpretive of 
obvious experience. This theory about Hume’s 
own beliefs is in my opinion improbable: but, 
apart from Hume’s own estimate of his philo- 
sophical achievement, it is in this sense that we 
must reverence him as one of the greatest of 
philosophers. | 

The conclusion of this argument is that the in- 
tervention of any sense-datum in the actual world 
cannot be expressed in any simple way, such as 
mere qualification of a region of space, or alter- 
natively as the mere qualification of a state of 
mind. The sense-data, required for immediate 
sense-perception, enter into experience in virtue of 
the eflicacy of the environment. This environment 
includes the bodily organs. For example, in the 
case of hearing sound the physical waves have 
entered the ears, and the agitations of the nerves 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 53 


have excited the brain. The sound is then heard 
as coming from a certain region in the external 
world. ‘Thus perception in the mode of causal 
eficacy discloses that the data in the mode of 
sense-perception are provided by it. This is the 
reason why there are such given elements. Every 
such datum constitutes a link between the two per- 
ceptive modes. Each such link, or datum, has a 
complex ingression into experience, requiring a ref- 
erence to the two perceptive modes. These sense- 
data can be conceived as constituting the character 
of a many-termed relationship between the organ- 
isms of the past environment and those of the 
contemporary world. 


6. Localization. 


The partial community of structure, whereby 
the two perceptive modes yield immediate demon- 
stration of a common world, arises from their 
reference of sense-data, common to both, to local- 
izations, diverse or identical, in a spatio-temporal 
system common to both. For example, colour 
is referred to an external space and to the eyes 
as organs of vision. In so far as we are dealing 
with one or other of these pure perceptive modes, 
such reference is direct demonstration; and, as iso- 


54 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


lated in conscious analysis, is ultimate fact against 
which there is no appeal. Such isolation, or at 
least some approach to it, is fairly easy in the case 
of presentational immediacy, but is very difficult in 
the case of causal efficacy. Complete ideal purity 
of perceptive experience, devoid of any symbolic 
reference, is in practice unobtainable for either 
perceptive mode. 

Our judgments on causal efficacy are almost in- 
extricably warped by the acceptance of the sym- 
bolic reference between the two modes as the com- 
pletion of our direct knowledge. This acceptance 
is not merely in thought, but also in action, emo- 
tion, and purpose, all precedent to thought. This 
symbolic reference is a datum for thought in its 
analysis of experience. By trusting this datum, 
our conceptual scheme of the universe is in gen- 
eral logically coherent with itself, and is corre- 
spondent to the ultimate facts of the pure percep- 
tive modes. But occasionally, either the coher- 
ence or the verification fails. We then revise 
our conceptual scheme so as to preserve the gen- 
eral trust in the symbolic reference, while relegat- 
ing definite details of that reference to the cate- 
gory of errors. Such errors are termed ‘delusive 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 55 


appearances.’ ‘This error arises from the extreme 
vagueness of the spatial and temporal perspectives 
in the case of perception in the pure mode of 
causal efficacy. There is no adequate definition of 
localization, so far as what emerges into analytic 
consciousness. The principle of relativity leads us 
to hold that, with adequate conscious analysis, 
such local relationships leave their faint impress in 
experience. But in general such detailed analysis 
is far beyond the capacity of human consciousness. 

So far as concerns the causal efficacy of the 
world external to the human body, there is the 
most insistent perception of a circumambient efi- 
cacious world of beings. But exact discrimina- 
tion of thing from thing, and of position from 
position, is extremely vague, almost negligible. 
The definite discrimination, which in fact we do 
make, arises almost wholly by reason of symbolic 
reference from presentational immediacy. The 
case is different in respect to the human body. 
There is still vagueness in comparison with the 
accurate definition of immediate presentation; al- 
though the locality of various bodily organs which 
are efficacious in the regulation of the sense-data, 
and of the feelings, are fairly well-defined in the 


56 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


pure perceptive mode of causal efficacy. The sym- 
bolic transference of course intensifies the defini- 
tion. But, apart from such transference, there is 
some adequacy of definite demarcation. 

Thus in the intersection of the two modes, the 
spatial and temporal relationships of the human 
body, as causally apprehended, to the external con- 
temporary world, as immediately presented, afford 
a fairly definite scheme of spatial and temporal 
reference whereby we test the symbolic use of 
sense-projection for the determination of the posi- 
tions of bodies controlling the course of nature. 
Ultimately all observation, scientific or popular, 
consists in the determination of the spatial rela- 
tion of the bodily organs of the observer to the 
location of ‘projected’ sense-data. 


7. The Contrast Between Accurate Definition 
and Importance. 


The reason why the projected sense-data are in 
general used as symbol, is that they are handy, 
definite, and manageable. We can see, or not see, 
as we like: we can hear, or not hear. There are 
limits to this handiness of the sense-data: but they 
are emphatically the manageable elements in our 
perceptions of the world. The sense of control- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 57 


ling presences has the contrary character: it is un- 
manageable, vague, and ill-defined. 

But for all their vagueness, for all their lack of 
definition, these controlling presences, these 
sources of power, these things with an inner life, 
with their own richness of content, these beings, 
with the destiny of the world hidden in their na- 
tures, are what we want to know about. As we 
cross a road busy with traffic, we see the colour 
of the cars, their shapes, the gay colours of their 
occupants; but at the moment we are absorbed in 
using this immediate show as a symbol for the 
forces determining the immediate future. 

We enjoy the symbol, but we also penetrate to 
the meaning. The symbols do not create their 
meaning: the meaning, in the form of actual ef- 
fective beings reacting upon us, exists for us in its 
own right. But the symbols discover this meaning 
for us. ‘They discover it because, in the long 
course of adaptation of living organisms to their 
environment, nature * taught their use. It devel- 
oped us so that our projected sensations indicate 
in general those regions which are the seat of im- 
portant organisms. 


* Cf. Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge, by 
Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan and Co., London, 1924. 


58 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


Our relationships to these bodies are precisely 
our reactions to them. The projection of our sen- 
sations is nothing else than the illustration of the 
world in partial accordance with the systematic 
scheme, in space and in time, to which these re- 
actions conform. 

The bonds of causal efficacy arise from without 
us. They disclose the character of the world from 
which we issue, an inescapable condition round 
which we shape ourselves. The bonds of pres- 
entational immediacy arise from within us, and 
are subject to intensifications and inhibitions and 
diversions according as we accept their challenge 
or reject it. [he sense-data are not properly to be 
termed ‘mere impressions—except so far as any 
technical term will do. They also represent the 
conditions arising out of the active perceptive func- 
tioning as conditioned by our own natures. But 
our natures must conform to the causal efficacy. 
Thus the causal efficacy from the past is at least 
one factor giving our presentational immediacy in 
the present. The how of our present experience 
must conform to the what of the past in us. 

Our experience arises out of the past: it en- 
riches with emotion and purpose its presentation 
of the contemporary world: and it bequeaths its 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 59 


character to the future, in the guise of an effective 
element forever adding to, or subtracting from, 
the richness of the world. For good or for evil, 


‘Pereunt et Imputantur.’ 


8. Conclusion. 


In this chapter, and in the former chapter, the 
general character of symbolism has been discussed. 
It plays a dominant part in the way in which all 
higher organisms conduct their lives. It is the 
cause of progress, and the cause of error. The 
higher animals have gained a faculty of great 
power, by means of which they can define with 
some accuracy those distant features in the im- 
mediate world by which their future lives are to 
be determined. But this faculty is not infallible; 
and the risks are commensurate with its impor- 
tance. It is the purpose of the next chapter to 
illustrate this doctrine by an analysis of the part 
played by this habit of symbolism in promoting 
the cohesion, the progress, and the dissolution of 
human societies. 


CHAPTER III 


Uses of Symbolism 


The attitude of mankind towards symbolism 
exhibits an unstable mixture of attraction and re- 
pulsion. The practical intelligence, the theoreti- 
cal desire to pierce to ultimate fact, and ironic 
critical impulses have contributed the chief mo- 
tives towards the repulsion from symbolism. 
Hard-headed men want facts and not symbols. A 
clear theoretic intellect, with its generous enthu- 
siasm for the exact truth at all costs and hazards, 
pushes aside symbols as being mere make-believes, 
veiling and distorting that inner sanctuary of 
simple truth which reason claims as its own. The 
ironic critics of the follies of humanity have per- 
formed notable service in clearing away the lum- 
ber of useless ceremony symbolizing the degrad- 
ing fancies of a savage past. The repulsion from 
symbolism stands out as a well-marked element in 
the cultural history of civilized people. ‘There 


can be no reasonable doubt but that this contin- 
60 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 61 


uous criticism has performed a necessary service 
in the promotion of a wholesome civilization, 
both on the side of the practical efficiency of or- 
ganized society, and on the side of a robust di- 
rection of thought. 

No account of the uses of symbolism is com- 
plete without this recognition that the symbolic 
elements in life have a tendency to run wild, like 
the vegetation in a tropical forest. ‘The life of 
humanity can easily be overwhelmed by its sym- 
bolic accessories. A continuous process of prun- 
ing, and of adaptation to a future ever requiring 
new forms of expression, is a necessary function 
in every society. The successful adaptation of 
old symbols to changes of social structure is the 
final mark of wisdom in sociological statesman- 
ship. Also an occasional revolution in symbol- 
ism is required. 

There is, however, a Latin proverb upon which, 
in our youth, some of us have been set to write 
themes. In English it reads thus:—Nature, ex- 
pelled with a pitchfork, ever returns. This prov- 
erb is exemplified by the history of symbolism. 
However you may endeavour to expel it, it ever 
returns. Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or cor- 
rupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very tex- 


62 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


ture of human life. Language itself is a symbol- 
ism. And, as another example, however you 
reduce the functions of your government to their 
utmost simplicity, yet symbolism remains. It may 
be a healthier, manlier ceremonial, suggesting 
finer notions. But still it is symbolism. You 
abolish the etiquette of a royal court, with its 
suggestion of personal subordination, but at offi- 
cial receptions you ceremonially shake the hand of 
the Governor of your State. Just as the feudal 
doctrine of a subordination of classes, reaching 
up to the ultimate overlord, requires its symbol- 
ism; so does the doctrine of human equality obtain 
its symbolism. Mankind, it seems, has to find a 
symbol in order to express itself. Indeed ‘ex- 
pression’ is ‘symbolism.’ 

When the public ceremonial of the State has 
been reduced to the barest simplicity, private 
clubs and associations at once commence to re- 
constitute symbolic actions. It seems as though 
mankind must always be masquerading. This 
imperative impulse suggests that the notion of an 
idle masquerade is the wrong way of thought 
about the symbolic elements in life. The func- 
tion of these elements is to be definite, manage- 
able, reproducible, and also to be charged with 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 63 


their own emotional efficacity: symbolic transfer- 
ence invests their correlative meanings with some 
or all of these attributes of the symbols, and 
thereby lifts the meanings into an intensity of 
definite effectiveness—as elements in knowledge, 
emotion, and purpose,—an effectiveness which 
the meanings may, or may not, deserve on their 
own account. The object of symbolism is the en- 
hancement of the importance of what is symbol- 
ized. 

In a discussion of instances of symbolism, our 
first difficulty is to discover exactly what is being 
symbolized. ‘The symbols are specific enough, but 
it is often extremely difficult to analyse what lies 
beyond them, even though there is evidently some 
strong appeal beyond the mere ceremonial acts. 

It seems probable that in any ceremonial which 
has lasted through many epochs, the symbolic in- 
terpretation, so far as we can obtain it, varies 
much more rapidly than does the actual cere- 
monial, Also in its flux a symbol will have dif- 
ferent meanings for different people. At any 
epoch some people have the dominant mentality 
of the past, some of the present, others of the 
future, and others of the many problematic fu- 
tures which will never dawn. For these various 


64. SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


groups an old symbolism will have different 
shades of vague meaning. 

In order to appreciate the necessary function 
of symbolism in the life of any society of human 
beings we must form some estimate of the bind- 
ing and disruptive forces at work. ‘There are 
many varieties of human society, each requiring 
its own particular investigation so far as details 
are concerned. We will fix attention on nations, 
occupying definite countries. ‘Thus geographical 
unity is at once presupposed. Communities with 
geographical unity constitute the primary type of 
communities which we find in the world. Indeed 
the lower we go in the scale of being, the more 
necessary is geographical unity for that close in- 
teraction of individuals which constitutes society. 
Societies of the higher animals, of insects, of 
molecules, all possess geographical unity. A rock 
is nothing else than a society of molecules, indulg- 
ing in every species of activity open to molecules. 
I draw attention to this lowly form of society in 
order to dispel the notion that social life is a pe- 
culiarity of the higher organisms. ‘The contrary 
is the case. So far as survival value is concerned, 
a piece of rock, with its past history of some eight 
hundred millions of years, far outstrips the short 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 65 


span attained by any nation. ‘The emergence of 
life is better conceived as a bid for freedom on 
the part of organisms, a bid for a certain inde- 
pendence of individuality with self-interests and 
activities not to be construed purely in terms of 
environmental obligations. The immediate ef- 
fect of this emergence of sensitive individuality 
has been to reduce the term of life for societies 
from hundreds of millions of years to hundreds 
_ of years, or even to scores of years. 

"The emergence of living beings cannot be as- 
cribed to the superior survival value either of the 
individuals, or of their societies. National life 
has to face the disruptive elements introduced by 
these extreme claims for individual idiosyncrasies. 
We require both the advantages of social pres- 
ervation, and the contrary stimulus of the hetero- 
geneity derived from freedom. The society is to 
run smoothly amidst the divergencies of its indi- 
viduals. There is a revolt from the mere causal 
obligations laid upon individuals by the social 
character of the environment. ‘This revolt first 
takes the form of blind emotional impulse; and 
later, in civilized societies, these impulses are crit- 
icized and deflected by reason. In any case, there 
are individual springs of action which escape from 


66 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


the obligations of social conformity. In order to 
replace this decay of secure instinctive response, 
various intricate forms of symbolic expression of 
the various purposes of social life have been in- 
troduced. The response to the symbol is almost 
automatic but not quite; the reference to the 
meaning is there, either for additional emotional 
support, or for criticism. But the reference is not 
so clear as to be imperative. The imperative in- 
stinctive conformation to the influence of the en- 
vironment has been modified. Something has re- 
placed it, which by its superficial character invites 
criticism, and by its habitual use generally escapes 
it. Such symbolism makes connected thought pos- 
sible by expressing it, while at the same time it 
automatically directs action. In the place of the 
force of instinct which suppresses individuality, 
society has gained the efficacy of symbols, at once 
preservative of the commonweal and of the indi- 
vidual standpoint. 

Among the particular kinds of symbolism which 
serve this purpose, we must place first Language. 
I do not mean language in its function of a bare 
indication of abstract ideas, or of particular ac- 
tual things, but language clothed with its com- 
plete influence for the nation in question. In ad- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 67 


dition to its bare indication of meaning, words 
and phrases carry with them an enveloping sug- 
gestiveness and an emotional efficacy. This func- 
tion of language depends on the way it has been 
used, on the proportionate familiarity of particu- 
lar phrases, and on the emotional history associ- 
ated with their meanings and thence derivatively 
transferred to the phrases themselves. If two 
nations speak the same language, this emotional 
eficacy of words and phrases will in general differ 
for the two. What is familiar for one nation 
will be strange for the other nation; what is 
charged with intimate associations for the one is 
comparatively empty for the other. For example, 
if the two nations are somewhat widely sundered, 
with a different fauna and flora, the nature-poetry 
of one nation will lack its complete directness of 
appeal to the other nation—compare Walt Whit- 
man’s phrase, 
‘The wide unconscious scenery of my land’ 

for an American, with Shakespeare’s 


. this little world, 
This precious stone set in the silver sea,’ 


for an Englishman. Of course anyone, American 
or English, with the slightest sense for history 
and kinship, or with the slightest sympathetic 


68 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


imagination, can penetrate to the feelings con- 
veyed by both phrases. But the direct first-hand 
intuition, derived from earliest childhood memo- 
ries, is for the one nation that of continental 
width, and for the other nation that of the little 
island world. Now the love of the sheer geo- 
graphical aspects of one’s country, of its hills, its 
mountains, and its plains, of its trees, its flowers, 
its birds, and its whole nature-life, is no small 
element in that binding force which makes a na- 
tion. It is the function of language, working 
through literature and through the habitual 
phrases of early life, to foster this diffused feel- 
ing of the common possession of a treasure in- 
finitely precious. 

I must not be misunderstood to mean that this 
example has any unique importance. It is only 
one example of what can be illustrated in a hun- 
dred ways. Also language is not the only sym- 
bolism effective for this purpose. But in an espe- 
cial manner, language binds a nation together by 
the common emotions which it elicits, and is yet 
the instrument whereby freedom of thought and 
of individual criticism finds its expression. | 

My main thesis is that a social system is kept 
together by the blind force of instinctive actions, 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 69 


and of instinctive emotions clustered around hab- 
its and prejudices, It is therefore not true that 
any advance in the scale of culture inevitably tends 
to the preservation of society. On the whole, the 
contrary is.more often the case, and any survey 
of nature confirms this conclusion. A new element 
in life renders in many ways the operation of the 
old instincts unsuitable. But unexpressed in- 
stincts are unanalysed and blindly felt. Disrup- 
tive forces, introduced by a higher level of ex- 
istence, are then warring in the dark against an 
invisible enemy. There is no foothold for the 
intervention of ‘rational consideration-—to use 
Henry Osborn Taylor’s admirable phrase. The 
symbolic expression of instinctive forces drags 
them out into the open: it differentiates them and 
delineates them. There is then opportunity for 
reason to effect, with comparative speed, what 
otherwise must be left to the slow operation of 
the centuries amid ruin and reconstruction. Man- 
kind misses its opportunities, and its failures are 
a fair target for ironic criticism. But the fact 
that reason too often fails does not give fair 
ground for the hysterical conclusion that it never 
succeeds. Reason can be compared to the force 
of gravitation, the weakest of all natural forces, 


70 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


but in the end the creator of suns and of stellar 
systems :—those great societies of the Universe. 
Symbolic expression first preserves society by add- 
ing emotion to instinct, and secondly it affords a 
foothold for reason by its delineation of the par- 
ticular instinct which it expresses. This doctrine 
of the disruptive tendency due to novelties, even 
those involving a rise to finer levels, is illustrated 
by the effect of Christianity on the stability of the 
Roman Empire. It is also illustrated by the three 
revolutions which secured liberty and equality for 
the world—namely the English revolutionary pe- 
riod of the seventeenth century, the American 
Revolution, and the French Revolution. England 
barely escaped a disruption of its social system; 
America was never in any such danger; France, 
where the entrance of novelty was most intense, 
did for a time experience this collapse. Edmund 
‘Burke, the Whig statesman of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, was the philosopher who was the approving 
prophet of the two earlier revolutions, and the 
denunciatory prophet of the French Revolution. 
A man of genius and a statesman, who has im- 
mediately observed two revolutions, and has med- 
itated deeply on a third, deserves to be heard 
when he speaks on the forces which bind and 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT Ts 


disrupt societies. Unfortunately statesmen are 
swayed by the passions of the moment, and Burke 
shared this defect to the full, so as to be carried 
away by the reactionary passions aroused by the 
French Revolution. Thus the wisdom of his gen- 
eral conception of social forces is smothered by 
the wild unbalanced conclusions which he drew 
from them: his greatness is best shown by his 
attitude towards the American Revolution. His 
more general reflections are contained first, in his 
youthful work 4 Vindication of Natural Society, 
and secondly, in his Reflections on the French 
Revolution. ‘The earlier work was meant ironi- 
cally; but, as is often the case with genius, he 
prophesied unknowingly. This essay is practi- 
cally written round the thesis that advances in the 
art of civilization are apt to be destructive of the 
social system. Burke conceived this conclusion 
to be a reductio ad absurdum. But it is the truth. 
The second work—a work which in its immediate 
effect was perhaps the most harmful ever written 
—directs attention to the importance of ‘preju- 
dice’ as a binding social force. There again I 
hold that he was right in his premises and wrong 
in his conclusions. 

Burke surveys the standing miracle of the ex- 


72 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


istence of an organised society, culminating in 
the smooth unified action of the state. Such a 
society may consist of millions of individuals, each 
with its individual character, its individual aims, 
and its individual selfishness. He asks what is 
the force which leads this throng of separate 
units to codperate in the maintenance of an or- 
ganised state, in which each individual has his 
part to play—political, economic, and esthetic. 
He contrasts the complexity of the functionings of 
a civilised society with the sheer diversities of its 
individual citizens considered as a mere group or 
crowd. His answer to the riddle is that the mag- 
netic force is ‘prejudice,’ or in other words, ‘use 
and wont.’ Here he anticipates the whole mod- 
ern theory of ‘herd psychology,’ and at the same 
time deserts the fundamental doctrine of the 
Whig party, as formed in the seventeenth century 
and sanctioned by Locke. This conventional 
Whig doctrine was that the state derived its ori- 
gin from an ‘original contract’ whereby the mere 
crowd voluntarily organised itself into a society. 
Such a doctrine seeks the origin of the state in a 
baseless historical fiction. Burke was well ahead 
of his time in drawing attention to the importance 
of precedence as a political force. Unfortu- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 73 


nately, in the excitement of the moment, Burke 
construed the importance of precedence as im- 
plying the negation of progressive reform. 

Now, when we examine how a society bends its 
individual members to function in conformity 
with its needs, we discover that one important op- 
erative agency is our vast system of inherited 
symbolism. ‘There is an intricate expressed sym- 
bolism of language and of act, which is spread 
throughout the community, and which evokes 
fluctuating apprehension of the basis of common 
purposes. The particular direction of individual 
action is directly correlated to the particular 
sharply defined symbols presented to him at the 
moment. The response of action to symbol may 
be so direct as to cut out any effective reference 
to the ultimate thing symbolized. ‘This elimina- 
tion of meaning is termed reflex action. Some- 
times there does intervene some effective refer- 
ence to the meaning of the symbol. But this 
meaning is not recalled with the particularity and 
definiteness which would yield any rational enlight- 
enment as to the specific action required to secure 
the final end. The meaning is vague but insistent. 
Its insistence plays the part of hypnotizing the 
individual to complete the specific action associ- 


74 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


ated with the symbol. In the whole transaction, 
the elements which are clear-cut and definite are 
the specific symbols and the actions which should 
issue from the symbols. But in themselves the 
symbols are barren facts whose direct associative 
force would be insufficient to procure automatic 
conformity. There is not sufficient repetition, or 
sufficient similarity of diverse occasions, to secure 
mere automatic obedience. But in fact the sym- 
bol evokes loyalties to vaguely conceived notions, 
fundamental for our spiritual natures. The result 
is that our natures are stirred to suspend all an- 
tagonistic impulses, so that the symbol procures 
its required response in action. Thus the social 
symbolism has a double meaning. It means prag- 
matically the direction of individuals to specific 
actions; and it also means theoretically the vague 
ultimate reasons with their emotional accompani- 
ments, whereby the symbols acquire their power 
to organize the miscellaneous crowd into a 
smoothly running community. 

The contrast between a state and an army 
illustrates this principle. A state deals with a 
greater complexity of situation than does its army. 
In this sense it is a looser organization, and in 
regard to the greater part of its population the 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT! OS 


communal symbolism cannot rely for its effective- 
ness on the frequent recurrence of almost identical 
situations. But a disciplined regiment is trained 
to act as a unit in a definite set of situations. The 
bulk of human life escapes from the reach of this 
military discipline. The regiment is drilled for 
one species of job. The result is that there is 
more reliance on automatism, and less reliance 
on the appeal to ultimate reasons. The trained 
soldier acts automatically on receiving the word 
of command. He responds to the sound and cuts 
out the idea; this is reflex action. But the appeal 
to the deeper side is still important in an army; 
although it is provided for in another set of sym- 
bols, such as the flag, and the memorials of the 
honourable service of the regiment, and other 
symbolic appeals to patriotism. Thus in an army 
there is one set of symbols to produce automatic 
obedience in a limited set of circumstances, and 
there is another set of symbols to produce a gen- 
eral sense of the importance of the duties per- 
formed. This second set prevents random reflec- 
tion from sapping automatic response to the 
former set. 

For the greater number of citizens of a state 
there is in practice no reliable automatic obedi- 


76 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


ence to any symbol such as the word of command 
for soldiers, except in a few instances such as the 
response to the signals of the traffic police. Thus 
the state depends in a very particular way upon 
the prevalence of symbols which combine direc- 
tion to some well-known course of action with 
some deeper reference to the purpose of the state. 
The self-organisation of society depends on com- 
monly diffused symbols evoking commonly dif- 
fused ideas, and at the same time indicating com- 
monly understood actions. Usual forms of verbal 
expression are the most important example of 
such symbolism. Also the heroic aspect of the 
history of the country is the symbol for its im- 
mediate worth. 

When. a revolution has sufficiently destroyed 
this common symbolism leading to common ac- 
tions for usual purposes, society can only save it- 
self from dissolution by means of a reign of 
terror. Those revolutions which escape a reign 
of terror have left intact the fundamental efficient 
symbolism of society. For example, the English 
revolutions of the seventeenth century and the 
American revolution of the eighteenth century 
left the ordinary life of their respective communi- 
ties nearly unchanged. When George Washing- 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 77 


ton had replaced George III, and Congress had 
replaced the English Parliament, Americans were 
still carrying on a well-understood system so far 
as the general structure of their social life was 
concerned. Life in Virginia must have assumed 
no very different aspect from that which it had 
exhibited before the revolution. In Burke's 
phraseology, the prejudices on which Virginian 
society depended were unbroken. The ordinary 
signs still beckoned people to their ordinary ac- 
tions, and suggested the ordinary common-sense 
justification. 

One difficulty of explaining my meaning is that 
the intimate effective symbolism consists of the 
various types of expression which permeate so- 
ciety and evoke a sense of common purpose. No 
one detail is of much importance. The whole 
range of symbolic expression is required, A na- 
tional hero, such as George Washington or Jef- 
ferson, is a symbol of the common purpose which 
animates American life. This symbolic function 
of great men is one of the difficulties in obtaining 
a balanced historical judgment. There is the 
hysteria of depreciation, and there is the oppo- 
site hysteria which dehumanises in order to exalt. 
It is very difficult to exhibit the greatness without 


78 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


losing the human being. Yet we know that at 
least we are human beings; and half the inspira- 
tion of our heroes is lost when we forget that 
they were human beings. 

I mention great Americans, because I am speak- 
ing in America. But exactly the same truth holds 
for the great men of all countries and ages. 

The doctrine of. symbolism developed in these 
lectures enables us to distinguish between pure in- 
stinctive action, reflex action, and symbolically 
conditioned action. Pure instinctive action is 
that functioning of an organism which is wholly 
analysable in terms of those conditions laid upon 
its development by the settled facts of its external 
environment, conditions describable without any 
reference to its perceptive mode of presentational 
immediacy. This pure instinct is the response of 
an organism to pure causal efficacy. 

According to this definition, pure instinct is the 
most primitive type of response which is yielded 
by organisms to the stimulus of their environment. 
All physical response on the part of inorganic 
matter to its environment is thus properly to be 
termed instinct. In the case of organic matter, 
its primary difference from inorganic nature is 
its greater delicacy of internal mutual adjustment 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 79 


of minute parts and, in some cases, its emotional 
enhancement. ‘Thus instinct, or this immediate 
adjustment to immediate environment, becomes 
more prominent in its function of directing action 
for the purposes of the living organism. The 
world is a community of organisms; these organ- 
isms in the mass determine the environmental in- 
fluence on any one of them; there can only be a 
persistent community of persistent organisms 
when the environmental influence in the shape of 
instinct is favourable to the survival of the indi- 
viduals. Thus the community as an environment 
is responsible for the survival of the separate in- 
dividuals which compose it; and these separate 
individuals are responsible for their contributions 
to the environment. Electrons and molecules sur- 
vive because they satisfy this primary law for a 
stable order of nature in connection with given 
societies of organisms. 

Reflex action is a relapse towards a more com- 
plex type of instinct on the part of organisms 
which enjoy, or have enjoyed, symbolically con- 
ditioned action. Thus its discussion must be post- 
poned. Symbolically conditioned action arises in 
the higher organisms which enjoy the perceptive 
mode of presentational immediacy, that is to say, 


890 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


sense-presentation of the contemporary world. 
This sense-presentation symbolically promotes an 
analysis of the massive perception of causal efh- 
cacy. The causal efficacy is thereby perceived as 
analysed into components with the locations in 
space primarily belonging to the sense-presenta- 
tions. In the case of perceived organisms external 
to the human body, the spatial discrimination in- 
volved in the human perception of their pure 
causal efficacy is so feeble, that practically there 
is no check on this symbolic transference, apart 
from the indirect check of pragmatic consequences, 
—in other words, either survival-value, or self- 
satisfaction, logical and esthetic. 

Symbolically conditioned action is action wnich 
is thus conditioned by the analysis of the percep- 
tive mode of causal efficacy effected by symbolic 
transference from the perceptive mode of pres- 
entational immediacy. This analysis may be right 
or wrong, according as it does, or does not, con- 
form to the actual distribution of the efficacious 
bodies. Inso far as it is sufficiently correct under 
normal circumstances, it enables an organism to 
conform its actions to long-ranged analysis of the 
particular circumstances of its environment. So 
far as this type of action prevails, pure instinct is 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 81 


superseded. ‘This type of action is greatly pro- 
moted by thought, which uses the symbols as ref- 
erent to their meanings. ‘There is no sense in 
which pure instinct can be wrong. But symboli- 
cally conditioned action can be wrong, in the sense 
that it may arise from a false symbolic analysis 
of causal efficacy. 

Reflex action is that organic functioning which 
is wholly dependent on sense-presentation, unac- 
companied by any analysis of causal efficacy via 
symbolic reference. The conscious analysis of 
perception is primarily concerned with the analy- 
sis of the symbolic relationship between the two 
perceptive modes. Thus reflex action is hindered 
by thought, which inevitably promotes the promi- 
nence of symbolic reference. 

Reflex action arises when by the operation of 
symbolism the organism has acquired the habit of 
action in response to immediate sense-perception, 
and has discarded the symbolic enhancement of 
causal efficacy. It thus represents the relapse 
from the high-grade activity of symbolic refer- 
ence. This relapse is practically inevitable in the 
absence of conscious attention. Reflex action can- 
not in any sense be said to be wrong, though it 
may be unfortunate. 


82 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


Thus the important binding factor in a com- 
munity of insects probably falls under the notion 
of pure instinct, as here defined. For each indi- 
vidual insect is probably such an organism that the 
causal conditions which it inherits from the im- 
mediate past are adequate to determine its social 
actions. But reflex action plays its subordinate 
part. For the sense-perceptions of the insects 
have in certain fields of action assumed an auto- 
matic determination of the insects’ activities. 
Still more feebly, symbolically conditioned action 
intervenes for such situations when the sense- 
presentation provides a symbolically defined speci- 
fication of the causal situation. But only active 
thought can save symbolically conditioned action 
from quickly relapsing into reflex action. The 
most successful examples of community life exist 
when ‘pure instinct reigns supreme. These ex- 
amples occur only in the inorganic world; among 
societies of active molecules forming rocks, plan- 
ets, solar systems, star clusters. 

The more developed type of living communities 
requires the successful emergence of sense-percep- 
tion to delineate successfully causal efficacy in the 
external environment; and it also requires its re- 
lapse into a reflex suitable to the community. We 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 83 


thus obtain the more flexible communities of low- 
grade minds, or even living cells, which possess 
some power of adaptation to the chance details 
of remote environment. 

Finally mankind also uses a more artificial 
symbolism, obtained chiefly by concentrating on a 
certain selection of sense-perceptions, such as 
words for example. In this case, there is a chain 
of derivations of symbol from symbol whereby 
finally the local relations, between the final sym- 
bol and the ultimate meaning, are entirely lost. 
Thus these derivative symbols, obtained as it were 
by arbitrary association, are really the results of 
reflex action suppressing the intermediate portions 
of the chain. We may use the word ‘association’ 
when there is this suppression of intermediate 
links. 

This derivative symbolism, employed by man- 
kind, is not in general mere indication of meaning, 
in which every common feature shared by symbol 
and meaning has been lost. In every effective 
symbolism there are certain esthetic features 
shared in common. The meaning acquires emo- 
tion and feeling directly excited by the symbol. 
This is the whole basis of the art of literature, 
namely that emotions and feelings directly ex- 


84 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


cited by the words should fitly intensify our emo- 
tions and feelings arising from contemplation of 
the meaning. Further in language there is a 
certain vagueness of symbolism. A word has a 
symbolic association with its own history, its 
other meanings, and with its general status in 
current literature. Thus a word gathers emo- 
tional signification from its emotional history in 
the past; and this is transferred symbolically to 
its meaning in present use. 

The same principle holds for all the more arti- 
ficial sorts of human symbolism:—for example, 
in religious art. Music is particularly adapted for 
this symbolic transfer of emotions, by reason of 
the strong emotions which it generates on its own 
account. ‘These strong emotions at once over- 
power any sense that its own local relations are 
of any importance. The only importance of the 
local arrangement of an orchestra is to enable us 
to hear the music. We do not listen to the music 
in order to gain a just appreciation of how the 
orchestra is situated. When we hear the hoot of 
a motor car, exactly the converse situation arises. 
Our only interest in the hoot is to determine a 
definite locality as the seat of causal efficacy de- 
termining the future. 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 85 


This consideration of the symbolic transference 
of emotion raises another question. In the case 
of sense-perception, we may ask whether the es- 
thetic emotion associated with it is derivative 
from it or merely concurrent with it. For ex- 
ample, the sound waves by their causal eflicacy 
may produce in the body a state of pleasurable 
esthetic emotion, which is then symbolically 
‘transferred to the sense-perception of the sounds. 
In the case of music, having regard to the fact 
that deaf people do not enjoy music, it seems that 
the emotion is almost entirely the product of the 
musical sounds. But the human body is causally 
affected by the ultra-violet rays of the solar spec- 
trum in ways which do not issue in any sensation 
of colour. Nevertheless such rays produce a de- 
cided emotional effect. Also even sounds, just be- 
low or just above the limit of audibility, seem to 
add an emotional tinge to a volume of audible 
sound. This whole question of the symbolic 
transfer of emotion lies at the base of any theory 
of the zsthetics of art. For example, it gives the 
reason for the importance of a rigid suppression 
of irrelevant detail. For emotions inhibit each 
other, or intensify each other. Harmonious emo- 
tion means a complex of emotions mutually in- 


86 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


tensifying; whereas the irrelevant details supply 
emotions which, because of their irrelevance, in- 
hibit the main effect. Each little emotion directly 
arising out of some subordinate detail refuses to 
accept its status as a detached fact in our con- 
scicusness. It insists on its symbolic transfer to 
the unity of the main effect. | 

Thus symbolism, including the symbolic trans- 
ference by which it is effected, is merely one ex- 
emplification of the fact that a unity of experience 
arises out of the confluence of many components. : 
This unity of experience is complex, so as to be 
capable of analysis. The components of experi- 
ence are not a structureless collection indiscrimi- 
nately brought together. Each component by its 
very nature stands in a certain potential scheme 
of relationships to the other components. It is 
the transformation of this potentiality into real 
unity which constitutes that actual concrete fact 
which is an act of experience. But in transforma- 
tion from potentiality to actual fact inhibitions, 
intensifications, directions of attention toward, di- 
rections of attention away from, emotional out- 
comes, purposes, and other elements of experience 
may arise. Such elements are also true compo- 
nents of the act of experience; but they are not 


SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 87 


necessarily determined by the primitive phases of 
experience from which the final product arises. 
An act of experience is what a complex organism 
comes to, in its character of being one thing. Also 
its various parts, its molecules, and its living cells, 
as they pass on to new occasions of their existence, 
take a new colour from the fact that in their im- 
mediate past they have been contributory elements 
to this dominant unity of experience, which in its 
turn reacts upon them. 

Thus mankind by means of its elaborate sys- 
tem of symbolic transference can achieve miracles 
of sensitiveness to a distant environment, and to 
a problematic future. But it pays the penalty, by 
reason of the dangerous fact that each symbolic 
transference may involve an arbitrary imputation 
of unsuitable characters. It is not true, that the 
mere workings of nature in any particular organ- 
ism are in all respects favorable either to the ex- 
istence of that organism, or to its happiness, or 
to the progress of the society in which the or- 
ganism finds itself. The melancholy experience 
of men makes this warning a platitude. No elabo- 
rate community of elaborate organisms could 
exist unless its systems of symbolism were in gen- 
eral successful. Codes, rules of behaviour, canons 


88 SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT 


of art, are attempts to impose systematic action 
which on the whole will promote favourable sym- 
bolic interconnections. As a community changes, 
all such rules and canons require revision in the 
light of reason. The object to be obtained has 
two aspects; one is the subordination of the com- 
munity to the individuals composing it, and the 
other is the subordination of the individuals to 
the community. Free men obey the rules which they 
themselves have made. Such rules will be found 
in general to impose on society behaviour in refer- 
ence to a symbolism which is taken to refer to the 
ultimate purposes for which the society exists. 

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to 
recognize that the major advances in civilization 
are processes which all but wreck the societies in 
which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the 
hand of a child. The art of free society consists 
first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and 
secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that 
the code serves those purposes which satisfy an 
enlightened reason. Those societies which can- 
not combine reverence to their symbols with free- 
dom of revision, must ultimately decay either 
from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life 
stifled by useless shadows, 


